"Jeff" wrote in message
. ..
Some years ago when you started ranting about catamarans, I made a
simple claim that you would have trouble finding any cases of
catamaran capsizes that met the following criteria: It had to be a
modern production cruising cat, not of the "crossbeam" style, or
homemade, or 40 years old; it had to be at least the size of my cat
(36'3") with appropriate beam and cruising rig; it had to be being
used for cruising, not racing or delivery. I even admitted that you
might find a few, but that it would likely be in conditions that would
put any monohull at severe risk, and that generally catamaran capsizes
end up as a story of survival, not loss.

And what have you come up with? You've scoured the web for years and
posted every story you could find, but as predicted the pickings have
been slim indeed. In fact, not a single incident you've reported fit
the criteria. Several have been 30 feet, which is generally
considered too small for serious weather. One of those was a racing
cat, and another was an very old design with a beam so narrow that it
could hardly be called a cat nowadays. Another was a crossbeam
design, with a known structural flaw. One was at anchor in a Category
5 hurricane, where many of the monohulls sank. You've even posted
links to Hobie capsizes! The Fountain Pajot Tobago 35 was close but
small and with a SA/Disp of almost 30 its rig is quite aggressive for
a cruising cat.

Further, with one exception, there was no loss of life in any of these
incidents. In that exception, a delivery crew left port and sailed
into one of the worst storms in Pacific Northwest history. Even so,
it appears everyone was on deck at the time of the capsize, and anyone
below would have survived. In fact, its possible that had someone
below activated the EPIRB (or had it been rig to automatically
activate) someone on deck might have been rescued.

And you completely ignore the fact that every year there are a number
of monohulls that sink or go missing, and that monohulls sink every
day in inland situations, even at the dock. Also, monohull sailors
are at risk every time they go forward; not so on cats. Almost all
monohulls are at great risk from collisions with logs, containers, and
whales; multihulls generally survive such episode long enough for
rescue. Incidents such as the loss of "Morning Dew" in Charleston
would be very unlikely in a modern catamaran.

On top of this, the vast majority of sailors, whether mono- or
multihull never, or very infrequently, actually go offshore, and of
those that do, most avoid the worst weather. For instance, for all of
your talk, you've never been more than 50 miles away from land; you've
never encountered conditions that could potentially overwhelm a larger
cat.

So you can rant about how you'd never sail a cat; that's fine by me.
Personally, nothing could make me spend more than a week on a 26
footer, let alone live on it for years. Why don't you explain to us
how you lost that boat?




Good job moving the bar, Jeff. I've posted dozens times and at least a
half dozen valid links in the past year alone of how unseaworthy
catamarans are. You can nit and you can pick and you can say, "That
ain't fair, Mom, he's not being fair!" but it won't avail you. The
pictures speak for themselves. Large cruising catamarans washed up
capsized on the beach in Oregon with loss of all hands. Pictures of
large cruising catamarans upside down off the English Coast. More
pictures of another upside down and being righted and pumped out with
total loss of mast and rigging. More reports of one turning turtle on a
simple trip across the Gulf of Mexico. It goes on and on. Keep moving
that bar, Jeff. It just makes you look like somebody who is incapable of
seeing the obvious.

Catamarans are too dangerous to be used for voyaging on the world's
oceans. They'll likely not survive a storm at sea intact. That's the
truth and you'd better start accepting it.

And your logic if totally flawed with respect to monohulls sinking. You
ignore the numbers. Your claim is like saying "Look how many Ford F-150
trucks are involved in wrecks compared to Volkswagen Microbuses?" Well,
isn't that special? Never mind there are probably ten thousand F-150s to
every Microbus. When there are a hundred catamarans voyaging and one
hears six of them turning turtle one can assume one probably doesn't
hear of six more that capsized. That's twelve out of a hundred. Pretty
unsafe by the most lax standards, IMHO!

Wilbur Hubbard



* Wilbur Hubbard wrote, On 8/16/2007 9:24 AM:
Yes, cruising catamarans have something extra. As a simple Google and
YouTube search using capsize and catamaran will reveal, the something
extra is the remarkable ease with which catamarans turn turtle.

With this in mind, any potential catamaran buyer must ask himself if
the paltry advantages of a catamaran - things such as small heel
angles, slightly faster speeds downwind, more elbow room below (but
not load carrying capacity), shallow draft and largish cockpit -
outweigh the fact that sooner or later the whole shebang is going to
end up upside-down and swamped. Don't even think about what happens
if you get trapped under the thing and drown. Just think about
upside-down. In other words, everything is ruined.

Why put up with a boat that has a designed-in flaw of being more
stable upside-down than rightside-up? Is the trade-off between a
platform that doesn't heel quite as much and an upside-down platform
worth it? Only you can answer that question. It depends upon how much
you love your life and the lives of your loved ones.

I wonder when the Coast Guard is going to get some balls and declare
any and all cruising catamaran ocean voyages "manifestly unsafe
voyages" and put a stop to them?

Wilbur Hubbard